Biopolitics, necropolitics, cosmopolitics – feminist and queer interventions: an introduction

I.

In 2015, first-time feature filmmaker Morgan Knibbe released to critical acclaim Those Who Feel the Fire Burning(2015), a documentary film that creatively examines what in mainstream discourses has most commonly been referred to as the contemporary European refugee crisis. The film is partially motivated by the tragic but well-publicized incident of October 2013 in which more than 350 Eritrean refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea when attempting to make it to the Italian island of Lampedusa on an over-crowded boat that caught fire and sank despite a rescue attempt by the Italian coast guard. The film highlights a now all-too-common story: while many who arrive at Europe’s shores are met with a hopeless situation, others tragically perish attempting to make it into Fortress Europe (see also Kaiser & Thiele, 2015; Quinan, 2018). While 2018 saw a drop in migrant deaths given the fact that fewer are attempting the dangerous journey, in part due to growing anti-immigrant sentiment spreading throughout Europe and a current EU political climate that chooses to increase and enforce border controls (on land and sea) instead of committing to its humanitarian obligations, the previous years reflected a devastating death toll: in 2016 a total of 3,047 migrants died in the Mediterranean en route to Europe, and in 2017 the death toll amounted to 2,048.¹ Knibbe’s poetic documentary is told from the perspective of one such individual, now a ghost who passes by the harsh realities of those refugees who are attempting to survive in Europe, a purgatory-like space situated somewhere between living and dying.

For those migrants and refugees attempting to access Fortress Europe, the violence of the border crossing is, to apply Judith Butler’s words, ‘a violence against those who are already not quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death’ (2004, p. 36). Those Who Feel the Fire Burning takes up this precarious physical and spiritual in-betweenness through the voice of its narrator, a ghost-subject who flies through cities and lands, making quick, sharp and other-than-human movements. Through its unconventional and unexpected cinematography and narration, the film eschews a classical narrative structure while prompting urgent social and political questions around immigration, violence and precarity. The dizzying camerawork unsettles our idea of both documentary and a cohesive narrative voice, thereby creating an affective form of visualization of its narrator who is present(ed) as neither alive nor dead.

Affect, as a social, pre-personal and pre-subjective dimension – that is, as that which forces us to feel – and as those personal experiences or states that we call emotions, is intimately tied up in the film experience. In thinking about its cultural and political role, the elicitation of affect is, as many scholars of film and affect theory have been right to point out (e.g. Ahmed, 2012; Deleuze, 2002; Marks, 2000), at the heart of cinema. In his own director’s statement, Knibbe echoes these concerns with affect, emotion and cinema in describing how he uses them in his work:

Filmmaking is the art of manipulation. As a filmmaker I’d like to manipulate my audience to such an extent with audiovisual devices that I can activate a mental process of both form as well as content. It’s important to experiment with the language of film in order to surprise the audience. By pulling people out of their comfort zone they are stimulated to look at existing values in a different way. When a journalistic topic is treated in this way, I think that the audience will think at a higher level about the information presented to them. I hope that this will decrease the distance between the topic and the audience. (Knibbe, n.d.)

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning helps its viewers to engage in a different conversation about the refugee crisis. In formal terms, the film undoes the objectivity of documentary, and in having a ghost-subject lead the way, the film also blurs existential boundaries, be they between life and death, truth and fiction, heaven and hell, reality and hallucination, or subjectivity and objectivity. With this film, Knibbe, on the one hand, forces us as viewers to take a look at the responsibilities we all bear in the current political situation. Yet, on the other hand, he enables us to ask how narrative (including the discourse we are fed by the media) can be effectively subverted. The film asks what difference it can make if we broaden the spectrum of politics to allow for more and – especially – for more than or other than the usual human(ist) spheres to think-with for a different present and future. Using a ghost or spirit to narrate and guide the film, the film also interrogates how such a change of register could transform our engagement with the urgent socio-political questions at stake: the matters of life and death in this contemporary climate, that is, the question of biopolitics, necropolitics and cosmopolitics.

As editors of this Special Issue, we have opened our introductory remarks with this film because of its engagement with these concepts that form the core of this collection of articles in the Journal of Gender Studies. While 2015 is often thought to mark the year of the European migration issue, and our own work on the nexus of bio-, necro- and cosmopolitics began indeed that same year in the midst of it all,² the truth is that this ‘crisis’ has only deepened since then. Five years along, as we conclude this publication and at the same time confront the ongoingness of the situation, this topic – in as much as the existential concerns and questions emerging from it – is all the more urgent and timely. Although today we are aware of varying factors that have broadened and contributed to this crisis mode of social, cultural and political lives all over the globe, we by now must also come to acknowledge that from this moment on, the situation will never be different. This is now our reality. And as we confront the fact that, so perversely, European power again lies in its power to let die – by first neglecting, then systemically overlooking and ultimately cultivating indifference towards those who arrive at Europe’s shores – this deadly dynamic also changes the world and who we are in it. The authors we bring together in this Special Issue, on the one hand, engage very closely with the nexus of biopolitics and necropolitics as a most suitable analytical framework for queer and feminist critical engagements with/in the contemporary socio-political climate. Yet, on the other hand, by bringing into view another angle that we refer to here as the cosmopolitical, what we as guest editors of this issue hope to achieve is to indeed cultivate another, a different – precisely not indifferent – engagement with those subject-matters that continue to write each of our todays every day.

II.

While biopolitics and necropolitics have gained more and more scholarly attention, we aim in this Special Issue to nuance this conversation by emphasizing feminist and queer investments and by adding the analytical lens of cosmopolitics to the ongoing debates around life/living and death/dying in the current political climate. The migration crisis, the rise of populism on a global scale, neo-imperial practices and homonationalist strategies, and state-sanctioned targeting of gender, sexual, racial and ethnic ‘others’ are only a few of the crises that we face today and that mark some lives as more – or less – worthy than others.

As Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined in his groundbreaking analysis, biopower, a new governing strategy focused on the regulation of populations and the management of life, arose in the late eighteenth century. This notion of ‘making live and letting die’ marked a significant shift from a medieval system wherein a singular sovereign could exercise the power to ‘let live and make die’ over a hierarchically organized people. The new governmentality also instigated a modernized notion of the social body and the subjects that embodied it. As Foucault describes, this technology exerted social and political power over a new type of social structure: ‘not exactly society … nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245). As the target of biopolitical management, this ‘multiple body’ requires forms of governance under which new and updated modes of control of both human and non-human agents are created and implemented. In this system, discourse and/as power produces a social subject who willingly self-implements the basic rules of Law.

Now, several decades after Foucault’s intervention and the emergence of biopower and a mode of governance known as biopolitics, we are forced to account for death and dying in a neo-imperial and neoliberal era in which a majority of people around the globe are pushed into precarious living situations, where millions of refugees are attempting to cross borders, specifically those of Europe and the United States, and in which technologies of destruction are not only more pervasive but have also become more sensorial (Mbembe, 2003, p. 34). In his supplement to Foucauldian biopolitics, Achille Mbembe, therefore, interrogates if the notion of biopower is still adequate in accounting for the contemporary political economy. ‘What place’, he asks, ‘is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 12). As his theoretical paradigm of analysis, Mbembe coins the terms necropower and necropolitics to explain how life in a biopolitical frame is always already subjugated to and determined by the power of death (Mbembe, 2003, 2019). In this sense, necropolitics questions in today’s political climate who gets to live and who must die – or who must live and who is let die – thereby putting forth a different hypothesis than had Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower. While thinking with the Foucauldian theoretical paradigms of analysis, necropolitics is much more concerned with how life is subjugated to the power of death. Thus, rather than showing how life and death are both structuring instruments of power (as if in a relation of equivalence), necropolitics asks about the asymmetrical conditioning of who gets to live and who must die. While Foucault keeps a certain conceptual distance, Mbembe emphasizes that they are no longer an even pair. Death, making die, is what structures living. Necropolitics thereby uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and (re)production while others are systemically marked for death, constructing a constantly shifting borderline between subjects deemed ‘productive’ and ‘lawful’ and non-subjects branded as ‘illegitimate’ or ‘illegal’.³

The concept of necropolitics also accounts for contemporary warfare and the various ways in which, as Mbembe explains, ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creating of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life’ (2003, p. 40). Referencing not only physical death but also social death, these death-worlds severely impact entire populations, ‘conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40). In the same vein, concepts like Lauren Berlant’s slow death (2007) and Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) underscore how the deterioration, devastation and destruction of certain human and non-human populations are a hallmark of necropolitical modes of governance and engagement. The way in which the conditions of possibility for life and death also come to be linked with the distribution of resources represents a fundamental bio- and necropolitical negotiation (Agamben, 1998; Butler, 2004; Mbembe, 2003, 2019; Weheliye, 2014). Nonetheless, life and death cannot be separated: biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’, as Rosi Braidotti explains (2013, p. 122). They are lenses that come together to allow us to analyse contemporary power relations and examine the inextricable politics of life and death at work on a planetary scale today.

This focus of critical research has been supplemented by a growing body of innovative scholarship in feminist and queer studies on biopower and necropower. Kyla Schuller (2018), for instance, documents in The Biopolitics of Feeling how race and sex became entangled in the nineteenth-century US context, with biopower serving to consolidate ‘in a sentimental mode that regulated the circulation of feeling throughout the population and delineated differential relational capacities of matter, and therefore the potential for evolutionary progress, as the modern concepts of race, sex, and species’ (2018, p. 5). Meanwhile, in the contemporary context, Alexander Weheliye (2014) closely analyses the racial dimensions of biopolitics and necropolitics in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Drawing inspiration from the seminal works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Weheliye interrogates the role of race in foundationally shaping modern notions of the human itself. His theory of ‘racializing assemblages’ understands race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans. Further, Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2014) has been foundational in its application of the concept of the ‘animacy hierarchy’ to interrogate the questionable yet materializing distinctions made between the living and the dead. This thinking through animacy as the hierarchically structured condition of what is considered life and liveability, or toxicity and disposability, makes a great contribution to disability studies and queer of colour critique.

Theoretical explorations of biopolitics and necropolitics have also been taken up within the field of queer studies. Jasbir K. Puar (2007, 2017) has been particularly instrumental in provoking an expanding body of work on queer necropolitics. Puar’s persuasive analysis has, for example, been furthered by the collection Queer Necropolitics, where Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco use queer necropolitics as ‘a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death’ in order to analyse the distinction of ‘queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death’ (Haritaworn, Kuntsman, & Posocco, 2014, p. 2). In trans studies as well, bio- and necropolitics have been useful in helping articulate how increased visibility and representation of trans and non-binary individuals happen alongside increasing and intensifying violence towards trans communities, particularly those of colour (cárdenas, 2017; Gossett, Stanley, & Burton, 2017; Snorton, 2017).

But while it may be that biopolitics and necropolitics could be the quickest to turn to in working through the contemporary sociopolitical climate, in our project of presenting queer and feminist interventions, we want to supplement this discussion by engaging with the concept of cosmopolitics. We take this concept from Isabelle Stengers who understands the cosmos as an operator of ‘putting into equality’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 995). She proposes a cosmopolitics, which while modelled on the ideal scientific method, considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question. In this sense, her cosmopolitical proposal precisely challenges the taken-for-granted ‘modern’ (i.e. colonial, patriarchal, capitalist) pretensions of objectivity, rationality and truth.⁴ Stengers’ cosmopolitical approach must therefore also be distinguished from the humanist classical understanding of cosmopolitanism, which aimed, as she writes, ‘at a project of a political kind [. . .] in which everyone might envisage themselves as members in their own right of the worldwide society’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 994). Stengers’ use of cosmos is different. Instead of a rights-based approach that brushes over precarious questions of in-/exclusion, cosmos in her thinking refers to ‘the unknown constituted by the [. . .] multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’ (2005, p. 995). Her project is premised on the idea that a politics that is not attached to a cosmos is moot, but that a cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant. Turning away from the universalizing assumptions of post-Enlightenment secular liberalism, Stengers admits that her ‘cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a “good” definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the “good” definition of a “good” common world’ (ibid.). Thus, this cosmopolitics cannot be read as aprogramme or a new political horizon to be striven for in the progressivist logic of linearity, overcoming and leaving behind. Rather, she emphasizes that cosmopolitics ‘happens in the mode of indeterminacy, that is, of the event from which nothing follows, no “and so…,” but that confronts everyone with the question of how they will inherit from it’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 996). Given our contemporary political climate, it might be too simple to reiterate the all-too-common political dogmas: equality, justice, freedom, recognition. Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation so that equality and justice are precisely not taken in the logic of equivalence (that is, a logic of interchangeability and based on a preset ‘common’ measure). A cosmopolitical perspective demands the most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies, because ‘[t]hose who meet have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victims …. Equality does not mean that they all have the same say in the matter but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).

In engaging with the above theoretical concepts, particularly as they relate to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, this issue’s contributions aim for an engagement with questions of biopolitics and necropolitics within the framework of the urge for a less exclusivist (and thereby hopefully less violent) cosmopolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism. The articles that follow address the boundaries of subjectivity and politics in a system that actively monitors and excludes certain identities, particularly those who do not – or cannot – conform to a white, middle-class, heteronormative, gender-normative, able-bodied, legally employed, state-documented existence, while simultaneously cultivating and promoting other bodies, identities and subjectivities. Taking account of these global dynamics that are shaped by asymmetrical power relations, this Special Issue aims at visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer futures that work towards planetary social justice.

Our contributors engage with questions of biopolitics, necropolitics and cosmopolitics informed by postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, critical posthumanism, migration studies, art and feminist/queer studies. Again, we offer cosmopolitics (Gilroy, 2010; Haraway, 2008, 2016; Stengers, 2005) as a fruitful posthuman(ist) and post-/decolonial intervention in order to think through biopolitical and necropolitical networks and assemblages that assign life- and death-giving force. This we do also in order to envision a move towards otherwise feminist and queer futures that allow us to rethink categories such as ‘human’ or ‘life’ based on modern onto-epistemological premises.⁵ In asking which lives are deemed worthy of recognition and inclusion in contemporary regimes of power and which lives are considered disposable, this Special Issue aims at opening up onto new ways of imagining politics, resistance strategies and more-than-human agencies.

III.

On the whole, the contributions collected here are not necessarily hopeful or optimistic. Such an approach would counteract the need for complexity when addressing the bio-, necro- and cosmopolitical nexus. While some of the texts present angles and perspectives in relation to current problematics of biopolitics and necropolitics, others explore dimensions related to cosmopolitics and cosmopoetics. Transdisciplinary approaches and intersectional analyses run through the articles, with a special attunement to exploring relations between discursive strategies and their socio-political effects on both local and global scales.

In ‘The Biopolitics of Languaging in the Cybernetic Fold: A Decolonial and Queer Ear to Cosmo-poetics’, Hyaesin Yoon offers a close engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial critique and Margaret Rhee’s poetry. Arguing for a decolonial intervention into posthumanist performativity using Wynter’s theory of homo narrans, the paper explores languaging as a biopolitical process of racialization and speciation in the era of cybernetics. Yoon then turns to Rhee’s poetry Robot, Love and the Kimchi Poetry Machine project to present the intimate interaction between human and machine brought to articulation in this work as a diasporic feminist technology of listening to difference, or, as Yoon calls it, a ‘cosmo-poetics’. The second article of this volume (Brena) Yu-chen Tai’s ‘Healing Ecology in Aurora Levins Morales’s Writings on Environmental Illness’, continues the focus on literary engagements with bio-, necro- and cosmopolitics. In this article, Tai explores the issue of environmental illness by focusing on the writings of Latina feminist poet and activist Aurora Levins Morales. In exploring Levins Morales’ resistant storytelling, Tai reveals an ontological trans-corporeal space in which the bodies of those with multiple chemical sensitivity overlap with the ecological body of the ravaged land. Tai showcases the ways in which healing can mean undergoing a cosmopolitical re-worlding, that is, thinking and living differently by decolonizing the compartmentalization of differences imposed by structures of domination. From there, we move to Dorothee Hölscher, Consolee Kanamugire and Hyacinth Udah’s co-authored contribution that follows the story of a female refugee and survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Entitled ‘A Matter of Lies and Death: Necropolitics and the Question of Engagement with the Aftermath of Rwanda’s Genocide’, the text uses Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman understanding of the intertwining of life and death to interrogate the legacies that the 1994 genocide has left in its wake. Based on ethnographic research, the article urges us to consider alternative ways of living with the ghosts of colonial pasts and to explore possibilities for healing that, under contemporary conditions of biopower, have been pushed to the realm of the unspeakable. Moving further into more-than-human horizons, Eike Marten analyses in her text entitled ‘Bio/diversity and Its Deadly Underside: Making Killable in Times of Emergency’ the shared technologies of power at work in the biopolitical governing of human mobility and the management of ‘nature’ in biodiversity discourses and practices. Reading three seemingly unrelated diversity stories alongside one another, Marten produces uncanny echoes between discourses of biodiversity and human mobility and elucidates each of their functions in today’s bio-/necropolitical regimes. In order to produce defamiliarising effects in the current hype around questions of diversity, Marten explicates the specificity of the encounters between discourses on human diversity and biodiversity, all of which are based on the divisive bio-/necropolitical line of making live and letting die. Following this contribution, Olga Cielemęcka’s intervention, titled ‘Forest Futures: Biopolitics of Gender, Nation and Purity in Europe’s last “Pristine” Forest’, further engages this Special Issue’s theme from the perspective of environmental concerns. Cielemęcka examines how the ideological and material aspects of ‘purity’ – a biopolitical concept par excellence – play out in the specific case of the environmental conflict in the Białowieża Forest that took place in Poland in 2017. From there, and in an attempt to transform the divisive logic of bio-/necropolitics, Cielemęcka looks for other ways to imagine and enact a surviving together differently. Turning to a performance work by Cecylia Malik – Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps – the Białowieża Forest re-emerges in the final part of Cielemęcka’s article as an otherwise human-nonhuman ecology: one in which lively impurity can inspire affinities between environmental actions and feminist struggles for just futures. Following on from there, we move to Tomasz Sikora’s contribution that also mobilizes art, this time from American writer, photographer and performance artist David Wojnarowicz. Entitled ‘Queer Life-Worlds and the Art of David Wojnarowicz’, the article approaches biopolitics and necropolitics through the notion of intensity in order to revitalize and redirect contemporary queer theorizing and to emphasize how queer politics can constitute a particular kind of bioresistance aimed at expanding possible life-worlds. For Sikora, ‘queer’ specifically references that which resists bio- and necropolitical instrumentalization. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, Sikora argues for an alternative, more-than-human, or cosmopolitical ecology of affects, affiliations and attachments. The Special Issue concludes with two articles that examine how tensions between necropolitics and neoliberalism fall specifically along racial lines. In ‘What Can Homonationalism Tell Us About Sexuality in South Africa?: Exploring the Relationships Between Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Sexual Exceptionalism and Homonormativity’, Andrew Tucker takes up the case of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic to explore the ways in which biopolitics and necropolitics have historically coalesced. The article emphasizes how different contemporary sexual subjectivities are bound up in biopolitical population regulation, a phenomenon that is enhanced by the way South Africa has framed its sexual exceptionalism. As Tucker shows, this process is also reliant on particular conceptions of homonormativity defined by class- and race-based exclusions. Finally, Shannon Winnubst’s ‘The Many Lives of Fungibility: Anti-Blackness in Neoliberal Times’ examines how neoliberalism continues to obfuscate anti-blackness and how the divisions and tensions between bio- and necropolitics must, therefore, be grappled with as especially racialized regimes. The paper maps what Winnubst calls ‘the many lives of the concept of fungibility’ through radical Black Studies scholarship and exposes how neoliberalism both appropriates and positively values social difference as celebration of life and diversity so that ‘we’ as neoliberal subjects will not come to grips with anti-blackness as the ontological ground(ing) of today’s episteme. While the article analyses most sharply the foundational role that black death plays in the (neo)liberal setting, Winnubst also gestures towards the thought of a possible seismic change at this historical moment; one in which coalitional struggles against white supremacy might endure the existential tensions that occur in the fight against the hegemonic ontology of whiteness.

In view of the contributions that form this Special Issue, by way of a conclusion we want to once more return to Those Who Feel the Fire Burning with which we began. In thinking further this now-everyday story of growing numbers of deaths as well as those who are barely surviving, we are drawn to feminist sociologist Avery Gordon’s (2008) brilliant text Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination in which she also uses the metaphor of ghosts and haunting as a way into a theoretical exploration of the idea that ‘life is complicated’. In this context, she writes that ‘[h]aunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed […] haunting [is] precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (2008, p. xvi). Gordon’s haunting words about haunting could have been written about Knibbe’s film or about the ongoingness of crises we are currently living through. They help to lay bare how the ways in which the past infringes upon the present may produce emotional and affective responses that stir us, haunt us, producing a ‘something-to-be-done’ from which we cannot turn away. It is, in a sense, this urgent call to which the articles of this Special Issue respond.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all contributors for their thoughtful articles and collaboration in the process of creating this Special Issue. We also want to extend our sincere thanks to the Journal of Gender Studies, and here especially to Blu Tirohl and Suzanne Clisby, for their support and trust in us as guest editors and for their interest in pursuing this Special Issue. Last but not least, thanks also to Pınar Türer for her help in finalising the manuscript for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Quinan

Christine Quinan is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Quinan’s research interests include queer theory, trans studies, postcolonial studies and feminist/queer pedagogy, with work on gender, surveillance and securitization appearing in several journals and edited volumes. Quinan’s book Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and its Postcolonial Legacies is forthcoming (2020) from University of Nebraska Press.

Kathrin Thiele

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Trained transdisciplinary in queer/feminist thought, critical posthumanisms and critical race and decolonial scholarship, Thiele’s research focuses on questions of critique, ethics and politics in contemporary times. She is author and co-editor of various books; her works appears in several journals and edited volumes. She is also co-founder of Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities (www.terracritica.net).

Notes

1. https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean.

2. In 2015, we co-organized the 23rd edition of the NOISE Summer School at Utrecht University on the topic of bio-, necro- and cosmopolitics. For further information, see https://graduategenderstudies.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/324/2015/02/NOISE-2015-flyer.pdf.

3. In emphasizing systemicity in the bio-/necropolitical governance of who is cultivated for life or who is let die, we follow radical Black Studies thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten and Sylvia Wynter who teach us how anti-Blackness systemically (i.e. (para-)ontologically) structures what is called Politics or The Political.

4. For an in-depth engagement with the history of the (natural) sciences, see Stengers’ two volumes of Cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2010, 2011). For an intellectual plea against inertia or resignation in the face of contemporary capitalism, see her co-authored work Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (Pignarre & Stengers, 2007) and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Stengers, 2015).

5. In a resonating Special Issue of Social Text entitled ‘Collateral Afterworlds’, guest editors Zoë H. Wool and Julie Livingston write in their introduction that their volume ‘takes up the all too timely problem of meaninglessness, ethical disorientation and the insufficiency of social life across contexts tied together by a pervasive sense of precarity and relentless uncertainty that puts meaning and social life in question’ (2017, p. 2). Our focus on the bio-, necro-, cosmopolitical nexus here similarly engages with such collateral afterworlds, in which ‘life goes on and on amid the damage, regardless’ (Wool & Livingston, 2017, p. 8).